A mysterious company backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has bought tens of thousands of acres of land for more than $800 million to build a new city near San Francisco.

• A company called Flannery Associates has purchased land in the county near San Francisco.

• Court documents show the company spent as much as $15,000 per acre.

• Silicon Valley has long sought to build a new city from scratch.

A mysterious company backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has taken over land in a northern California county in an apparent attempt to build a brand new city in the state.

The New York Times reported Among those investors are some of the most famous names in the valley, from Marc Andreessen to Lauren Powell Jobs.

Flannery Associates has spent $800 million to buy thousands of acres of farmland in Solano County, northeast of San Francisco. Court documents obtained by the Insider Program.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Flannery had purchased approx 52,000 acres of agricultural land around Travis Air Force Base since 2018. According to the report, government officials began investigating the purchases due to concerns that foreign interests might be behind the company.

So the whole base is now cordoned off. Catherine Moy, Mayor of Fairfield, told ABC 7 News. “So there is no part untouched by Flannery.”

Little is known about Flannery Associates or her city’s specific plans.

And according to The Times, the company is leading Jan Ceramica 36-year-old former Goldman Sachs trader.

Flannery’s backers include Andreessen, Powell Jobs, Michael Moritz Sequoia Capital, Co-Founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffmanand others, according to the report.

It is unclear how much each of them invested in the company.

In 2017, Flannery Associates pitched an idea to transform Solano County land into a walkable, clean-energy city housing tens of thousands of residents, the Times reported. Real estate data It shows that the current median price of housing in the county is $585,000.

In an email obtained by The Times, Moritz said Flannery had purchased about 1,400 acres of land for less than $5,000 an acre.

But the price tag has increased since then, with Flannery spending as much as $15,000 per acre, attorneys for Flannery Associates said in court documents.

In May, Flannery’s attorneys filed a lawsuit lawsuit against a group of landowners in Solano County, saying they had conspired to inflate the price of their land.

The lawsuit alleges that Flannery overpaid the owners by approximately $170 million and is seeking damages of at least $510 million.

In a motion to dismiss the suit, filed in July, the landowners said they “either engaged in good faith transactions to sell the land, or were not seduced by Flannery’s prices, because they had no desire to do so”. (or ability) to sell.”

Attorneys for Flannery Associates and the landowners did not respond to a request for comment outside of business hours.

Silicon Valley has long sought to build a city from scratch, sometimes with a utopian vision of a city “Smart City.”

in 2016Y Combinator, a startup accelerator in Silicon Valley, is starting to look at how to build a city that can address California’s affordable housing crisis.

“We want to build cities for all humans – for tech and non-technical people,” the metronome wrote. We’re not interested in building a “crazy libertarian utopia for techies.”

Technology founders, incl Bill Gates And Elon Musk, they also had visions for their cities.

Musk was recently purchased 3,500 acres of land outside of Austin, Texas, to build a city he intends to call “Snailbrook”.

Sources told the newspaper that he envisioned “a kind of Texas utopia along the Colorado River.”

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